Problems connecting MA onPC to Capture Polar

[Wernlund]

Timmeh,

 

It is indeed great that Art-Net is free and open source and easy to implement as well. Unfortunately it has caused a lot of problems because of its formal IP address range restricitions (and perhaps mainly) because of lack of knowledge of networking and IP technology among many developers. It can be quite tricky to get some systems talking to eachother simply because of IP configuration.

 

Streaming ACN (BSR E1.31) is actually almost quite as simple and straightforward as ArtNet, but features many other advantages. Now I'm not a big fan of the PLASA CPWG (in fact I love to flame the whole thing), but if you e-mail them nicely as a developer you may find that although officially you need to pay for the spec, getting hold of it as a PDF is quite easy and free.

 

You also mention CITP, and being the father of it I can't resist a comment there. The purpose of CITP is mainly to fill out the holes not covered by other protocols, such as transferring encrypted / protected DMX to a visualizer (CITP is not intended for any form of actual show control and is thus not competing with Artnet or ACN / sACN in any way) or video thumbnails to a lighting console (so the very feature you pointed out there is one of the things CITP does) using an open and free protocol (the specs are on www.citp-protocol.org). The whole idea of CITP is to avoid the tower of Babel problem by providing an open show control metadata (data aiding the control of, but not actually controlling the show) protocol.

 

(Just noticing another reference in this thread to CITP as an alternative to ArtNet / sACN.. which is simply not true.. where was this picked up? A magazine article?)

 

Having said that, I still believe Art-Net will prevail because of how simple it is to implement and find the specs for it. I have skimmed through the v3 spec of Art-Net though and completely fail to see how it could be faster than either v1 or v2 though. As far as I can see the changes have got absolutely nothing with speed to do - is it just a marketing trick?

 

 

Cheers,

Lars Wernlund

Technical Director, Capture Sweden

Edited August 9, 2011 by Wernlund

[indyld]

(Just noticing another reference in this thread to CITP as an alternative to ArtNet / sACN.. which is simply not true.. where was this picked up? A magazine article?)

 

I've just looked back through the thread and can't find any such reference, but as it appears that my post is the only other that mentions CITP, as an example of a protocol that deals with visualisers etc. I can assure you that I don't suggest CITP as an alternative to ArtNet / sACN.

 

And I have to admit, I don't really read industry articles... ;-)

[SBLD]

I know GrandMA2 PC connects directly to WYSIWYG without an NSP because I have done this many times,

and the console even has a menu option for this connection. Whether or not series 1 supports this I do not know.

Might be worth giving MA a shout. If in doubt it is normally an IP address issue.

[Wernlund]

I've just looked back through the thread and can't find any such reference, but as it appears that my post is the only other that mentions CITP, as an example of a protocol that deals with visualisers etc. I can assure you that I don't suggest CITP as an alternative to ArtNet / sACN.

 

And I have to admit, I don't really read industry articles... ;-)

 

Great! There's little "marketing material" available for these protocols so it can easily get confusing. A misinformed article could be disastrous. :-)

 

 

Cheers,

Lars Wernlund

Technical Director, Capture Sweden

[timmeh2]

Hi Lars

 

Thanks for commenting - I too thought that CITP was a replacement, rather than an addition. I think maybe I misread the thread too because I got the same impression you did.

 

You're more than right about Art-Net's physical layer being a bit confusing. All the problems I've seen is people misinterpreting the 2.X.X.X. rule when building their networks.

 

All the best

Timmeh

[Firewood1]

My word, I disappear for a couple of days to try and work on this problem and come back to find my topic well and truly trashed!! ;-)

 

Back to the subject of connecting MA onPC to Capture, I have just posted the below message on the Capture forum. Hopefully Lars will post his reply in both places so that if anyone else has this issue it will help them.

 

Hi Lars,

 

Thankyou for you advice on the Blue Room forum. However, 2 days later and after a lot of messing about with my system, I have yet to make a connection.

 

Here's where I am now.

 

My Macbook is running Capture in Windows 7 Ultimate using Bootcamp.

 

My PC is running MA onPC in Windows XP Professional.

 

I have managed to get Hog 3 to connect with this setup, which gives me hope.

 

When leaving Capture to detect the IP address "automatically" I cannot get it to work. So I tried to tell it to use the specific IP address of my LAN. Capture said for the change to take place I need to restart. When I close Capture it will not reopen unless I reboot the machine - the change does not hold.

 

On the MA onPC side of things, I am not totally certain what I need to be doing to create the connection. I have found the MA Network Configuration and set this to the IP address of the LAN. I must stress my network does work and I can ping the Mac. I am then unsure what I need to do. I tried starting a session, which I figured would be the way to go.

 

Back to the Macbook and Capture. Ignoring the fact the network setting wont change from automatic, when I try and start the MA NET, I click start and it "thinks" for a few seconds but then does nothing.

 

Basically I'm totally lost with this and getting very frustrated about the time I am losing.

 

Please help! I will also post this on Blue Room so Joe can see.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

 

 

Any help with the above issue - particularly from the MA side wuld be gratefully received. I am sure Lars will deal with the Capture side.

 

Colin

[Wernlund]

Hi Colin,

 

I've had a chance to take a look at it now and got it working - this is my setup;

 

Windows Vista with grandMA onPC 2.3.1.1, IP 192.168.1.43

Windows 7 with Capture Polar, IP 192.168.1.31

 

In grandMA onPC I went to 'Setup' and 'Network master', 'MA Network Control'. There I changed the 'Station IP' to 192.168.1.43 and restarted MA onPC. I went back in there and input a 'Session name' ("Lars") and clicked on 'Start/Join Session'.

 

In Capture, I opened the MA-Net settings, changed to "MA-Net2" and clicked on 'Start'. Capture connected and then listed all universes.

 

At this point, unsure of how to operate an MA, I patched a VL fixtures to channel 1, and then gave it 100%, which was reflected in Capture's universe view.

 

I hope this helps!

 

 

Cheers,

Lars Wernlund

Technical Director, Capture Sweden

[Firewood1]

Hi Lars,

 

I have finally got this working. Your advice did lead me to solving this so thankyou very much.

 

Your example was for MA2 onPC and not MA onPC. However, the principals of networking are very similar and it showed me that the way I had been trying to configure MA onPC was correct. However, I could still not create a connection with Capture.

 

Next I wondered if a connection issue existed with MA onPC (not MA2) and so I downloaded the MA2 onPC software. This too would not connect to Capture on my Windows 7 setup!

 

I have discovered the problem lies with the presence of the Wholehog 3 Visualisation Connectivity application which I have installed on the Capture machine.

 

In my original post I said "When leaving Capture to detect the IP address "automatically" I cannot get it to work. So I tried to tell it to use the specific IP address of my LAN. Capture said for the change to take place I need to restart. When I close Capture it will not reopen unless I reboot the machine - the change does not hold."

 

I discovered that firstly it IS necessary to tell Capture to use the IP of the XP machine, as the sight of various other networks (Bluetooth, WiFi etc) were blocking automatic connection. Secondly, when closing down Capture, the Hog 3 VC app does not close with it, and this was blocking Capture from restarting unless I rebooted the machine. After the reboot, the IP changes were not held as the software "restart" had never taken place. Wondering if the Hog 3 VC app was the issue, I uninstalled it and tried to make this network setting change again and Capture restarted as it should and I was immediately able to connect with both MA and MA2 onPC.

 

To summarise, the single reason for the problem was that the network changes in Capture could not be made because the Hog 3 VC did not close along with Capture. Had I just closed it from the Task Manager, Capture would have restarted fine and I would not have had so much trouble.

 

I can confirm that now the network change for MA Net in Capture has been set, having Hog 3 VC running presents no connectivity issues at all with Capture and MA onPC. It has been reinstalled!! :-)

 

I wonder if in the next release of Capture you could make it possible for Capture to automatically close the Hog 3 VC app when Capture itself closes???

 

Sorry for the long post, but I hope this information is helpful to yourself and also other users.

 

Now I can learn MA! :-( (Can you tell I'm a Hog boy?)

 

Thankyou for your help, and to everyone who also contributed to this thread.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

[greggr1]

Sorry to jump on this forum but I'm having issues with connecting Grand ma onpc 3.7.0.5 with capture student edition Via Ma Net 2. I'm practically pulling my hair out with why it's not working, please. I have ma onpc set to use the loopback adapter as it's all on same pc for now. and also the exact same for capture which is set in conectivity options to use the loopback adapter ip address however I'm seeing capture able to start ma net 2 but just not connect with grand ma or see anything do anything when I change fixture parameters in ma.

[johnhuson]

Keep in mind this is an incredibly old post and things have changed a lot, the Capture version refered to in this post was released over a decade ago.

 

Do you have any MA hardware attached to your onpc system that unlock parameters? If not then no amount of loopback adapters and changing connectivity options is going to help you. You cannot get ANY sort of output from an MA PC system without this.

 

From what I understand there used to be a way of connecting MA with Capture without hardware but MA removed the ability to do this.

[timmeh2]

Hi

 

 

Some rather cringe-worthy posts on my part from back then.

 

MA1 on PC (up to desk version 6.606) will output MA-Net without any unconnected hardware, although capture will need to be on the same subnet for it to see the desk.

 

MA2 does not, it requires at least one piece of hardware, be it an NDP, VPU, Network Dimmer or MA2 console before it spits out anything.

 

I presume the change was implemented because it doesn't take a huge amount of effort to decode MA-Net v1 packets and once you've got the raw DMX, you can do what you like with it. I know that there were suppliers from China who, along with counterfeiting the entire console range, were building Artnet and DMX dongles that could be driven directly from onPC.

 

If it's just for academic purposes, then I'm happy to say you can still download MA1 on PC from MA's website.

 

All the best

Timmeh